Can Architecture be an Emancipatory Project?: Dialogues on Architecture and the Left: Dialogues on the Left - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782797378 ISBN 13: 9781782797371

Verlag: John Hunt Publishing, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Can architectural discourse rethink itself in terms of a radical emancipatory project? And if so, what would be the contours of such a discourse?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Nadir Lahiji is Adjunct Associate Professor of architecture at the University of Canberra, Australia. He is an architect, educator and a critical theorist. He teaches architecture theory, modernity, and contemporary criticism in the intersection of philosophy, radical social theory and psychoanalytical theory. He has taught in number of institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, Pratt Institute, Georgia Tech in the US, and the Lebanese American University, Beirut.

Nadir Lahiji is Adjunct Associate Professor of architecture at the University of Canberra, Australia. He is an architect, educator and a critical theorist. He teaches architecture theory, modernity, and contemporary criticism in the intersection of philosophy, radical social theory and psychoanalytical theory. He has taught in number of institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, Pratt Institute, Georgia Tech in the US, and the Lebanese American University, Beirut.

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Can Architecture be an Emancipatory Project?

Dialogue on the Left

By Nadir Lahiji

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2015 Nadir Lahiji
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78279-737-1

Contents

Notes on Contributors, 
Introduction — Nadir Lahiji, 
Questions, 
Dialogues: Round One, 
1. Autonomy's Adventures: or What Does it Mean to Politicize Architecture? — Libero Andreotti, 
2. Architecture, the Built and the Idea of Socialism — David Cunningham, 
3. Architects, Really — Peggy Deamer, 
4. On The Impossibility of an Emancipatory Architecture: The Deadlock of Critical Theory, Insurgent Architects, and the Beginning of Politics — Erik Swyngedouw, 
Dialogues: Round Two, 
5. The Misery of Theory: On Universality, Contingency, and Truth — Libero Andreotti, 
6. Architecture, Capitalism and the 'Autonomy' of the Political — David Cunningham, 
7. Architecture/Agency/Emancipation — Peggy Deamer, 
8. But What About Left Architecture? — Erik Swyngedouw, 
9. The Project of Emancipation, the Communist Hypothesis, and a Plea for The Platonism of Architecture — Nadir Lahiji, 
Afterword — Joan Ockman, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

Autonomy's Adventures: or What Does it Mean to Politicize Architecture?

Libero Andreotti

It might be said that a chiasmus has emerged recently in one of the longest-running debates in architectural theory: from the autonomy of architecture that was the almost obsessive preoccupation of so much post-modernist writing, one has passed, with a recent book by Pier-Vittorio Aureli, to the architecture of autonomy. This reversal, or shift in perspective, brings the hyper-politicized discourse of the Italian movement autonomia back into a conversation over a term — autonomy — that some among today's "new pragmatists" had already consigned to indefinite retirement.

But is the figure of speech that Fredric Jameson once called the Marxist trope par excellence just a rhetorical ploy, a redundant pleonasm designed to uselessly prolong the debate, or is it actually capable of generating the disjunctive shifts the chiasmus has rightly become famous for in the writings of Marx, Benjamin, or Debord? The long answer to this question would depend on whether the ideas advanced by Italian workerists — on the immateriality of work, the centrality of the working class, and the essentially reactive character of capitalism — might offer a plausible framework to understand some of the major developments that have taken place in the field of architecture over the last four decades. Such an analysis, important as it is, is beyond the scope of this essay. What might be worth trying, instead, is a more general reflection on how the chiasmus itself might work to reshape the conversation around the scope and limits of autonomy, and the possibility of critical work more generally.

For Debord, the particular type of chiasmus under consideration here, called the "reversed genitive," was nothing less than "an expression of historical revolutions distilled into a form of thought." Hegel had made it the basis of his epigrammatic style, and Feuerbach, alongside other left Hegelians, had used it to mount a devastating critique of Christianity. The unmatched master in the use of the chiasmus, however, had been the young Marx, who in The Poverty of Philosophy (a chiastic inversion of Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty) had made the chiasmus into the principal rhetorical trope for an "insurrectionary" style of argument that, according to Debord, "restored all the subversive qualities of concepts that have congealed into respectable truths." The Situationist technique of detournement was itself heavily indebted to the chiasmus for the way it sought to achieve both a conceptual reversal and an active diversion of accepted truths towards new forms of revolutionary practice.

Today, it is an open question whether any conceptual reversal within architectural theory could seriously make such lofty claims. Even so, some of the possibilities inherent in Aureli's reversal seem worth pursuing. To this end, a few points on political context, obvious as they may be to some, are essential.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, no discipline has been immune to the deeply corrosive effects of the neo-conservative ideology he ushered in. As Paolo Virno notes, Reaganism was much more than a right-wing reaction. Across the world, its material effects were closer to those of a "revolution in reverse." A "long state of emergency" that "went to the root of things and worked methodically," leaving nothing unchanged, Reaganism not only dismantled the Welfare State, strengthening what Pierre Bourdieu called the "right hand" of government (its military and policing functions) over the "left hand" of its social programs, but invested massively in propagandizing, through every available means and with an unprecedented power of penetration, an extreme anti-statist market fundamentalism designed to discredit any political alternative, in the workplace above all, but also, and more insidiously, in the places where public opinion and cultural attitudes were formed.

In the United States, the widespread imposition of neo-conservative doctrine had two major effects on architectural discourse. One was to initiate a long decline in the social awareness inherited from the 1960s. Given theory's investments in that radical critique, this process was reflected in the changing position of theory in many schools and critical venues where, hemmed in by the taboos and prohibitions imposed by the corporatized structure of university departments and cultural establishments like the MOMA in New York, critical discourse came to display an increasingly passive and almost reverential character reminiscent of the polite conversation of an eighteenth century salon. The other major effect was a cultural transformation for which the best comparison, for me, would be the movement of "hermeticism" in the 1930s — a term used to describe the mechanism of containment whereby social and political critique are driven underground and made to resurface on a purely aesthetic level. In the US, this was especially apparent in the conflicted formal language of deconstruction and its politically resonant, but materially ineffectual, forms of argument and address. In architecture schools and elsewhere, deconstructivism's aestheticisation of politics resulted in a characteristic mode of theorizing that Debord called "lateral critique," a stance "which perceives many things with considerable candour and accuracy, but places itself to one side. Not because it affects some sort of impartiality — for on the contrary it must seem to find much fault — yet without ever apparently feeling the need to reveal a cause, to state, even implicitly, where it is coming and where it wants to go." Elsewhere, in what can now be seen as an effort to defuse, and then to disarm the critical force of theory, Debord would compare this type of discourse to a "weapon without a trigger." Critical theory's final demise, however, came with the emergence of the overtly managerial and pop-marketing discourses that began to dominate architectural debates under the term "new pragmatism" in the early 2000s.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to consider the extent to which the discourse of autonomia — in the peripheral but...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: John Hunt Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1782797378
• ISBN 13: 9781782797371
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Herausgeber: Lahiji Nadir
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar